And the reason the bulldozers were so busy was that the tourists were pouring in, stimulating the appetite, making the town hungry by what it fed on. Mintja, the Aborigines call them – ants. The same word exactly that the Cornish use for visitors – emmets. It is a ludicrous complaint normally – one tourist bemoaning the presence of another. But there were too many in Alice Springs and too much of what both brought them here and kept them occupied until they left – travel agents, bus companies, and buses. Buses on every corner, reversing, shuddering, double-parking, loading up and loading off. You could live with such numbers in Florence because you were only there, after all, to see the paintings: but you went to Alice Springs to experience remoteness, to congratulate yourself on the completion of a trek, and you couldn’t do that if the rest of Australia was already there before you, installed in Todd Street Mall and photographing Aborigines when you got there.

Also photographing Aborigines and just about everything else in Alice Springs when we got there was the film crew of The Last Frontier, a mini-series being made for American and Australian television, starring Linda Evans, the immobile alabaster actress made famous by Dynasty. According to the publicity, The Last Frontier was ‘a classic romance’, the story of an American woman struggling for survival against the harsh Australian outback. The part of the harsh Australian outback was taken, naturally, by Jack Thompson. The word was that Linda Evans had arrived with her entourage the day before and was staying at the Sheraton. The whole town was on the qui vive. Any reasonably preserved matron under fifty with a large bust and hair the colour of silver fox had the chance of creating a sensation on the streets.

Just to be on the safe side – I didn’t want to be mistaken for Jack Thompson – I kept a low profile on my first morning. I sat in quiet corners of cafés and read the papers. Someone from a peace group handed me a leaflet entitled Everything you always wanted to know about Pine Gap. Among other things, it said, ‘Pine Gap is run by the Central Intelligence Agency and the top-secret National Security Agency . . . Over 500 Americans and Australians work there. Almost all top-security staff are American . . . As the eyes and ears of the U.S. nuclear forces, it is a top-priority nuclear target . . . It is 19 km south-west of Alice.’ I had two thoughts about this. One was that it helped explain why there were so many extravagantly large rodeo-type Ford utilities in town. The other had more to do with principles: not only had Linda Evans, a film company, and every other traveller beaten me to Alice Springs, it now seemed the CIA had got here before me as well.